Enough with the “Stab in the Dark Marketing”!

I can tell the the guy on the other end of the line is on some section of California highway as we begin our scheduled call. He might be headed to a client site, or – more likely – to a sales meeting.

He owns a telecom reseller. When he’s not trying to close a sale, he’s trying to drum up the next sale to keep the cash flowing.

He tells me that when he gets back to the office, he’ll call a client who’s received all of the agreed-upon services, but hasn’t sent that agreed-upon check. His office admin sent a few emails to try to collect, but still no check. And she doesn’t seem to share his sense of urgency.

Too Busy to Think About Marketing

Like a lot of SMB owners, my running-to-stand-still friend wears the hat of sales engineer, account rep, part-time A/R clerk and a dozen others. And while he’s pretty savvy when it comes to Marketing, he doesn’t have the time to learn the Marketing Automation software he just bought, much less to plan a campaign, write the content, build the landing pages, blah, blah, blah.

He knows the right marketing tactics will make his business easier for prospects to find and can help him separate the wheat from the chaff, but he’s too busy to even think about it.

Campaign-in-a-Box

So what are his options?

Buy a “Campaign-in-a-Box”? Who’s going to run it? And who’s going to edit those emails so that they sound like something an IT Director at a hospital or regional bank would even care about?

Hire yet another Marketing agency? That’s an option, though he’s already been down that road a couple of times and he’s not sure he got much benefit.

Check out my next blog in this series and see why I recommend against those two options and in favor of a third and better way: Data-driven Marketing.

Let’s get away from “Stab in the Dark” marketing and instead use the data our CRM and Google Analytics are collecting to move leads to opportunities for Sales to win.